Spelling

When Sony began courting Aaron Sorkin to write its Steve Jobs movie a few months ago, it couldn't have seemed like a more perfect fit. Sorkin was the best around at chronicling the complexity and fragility of genius, and his stock was sky-high; in fact, with “The Social Network” and “Moneyball,” the writer had just picked up Oscar nominations two years in a row for screenplays about those very types. But like a cable news network erroneously reporting on a Supreme Court decision, Sorkin has crashed to Earth.

Were it not for the presence of brainy director Steven Soderbergh, it might be easy to write off the male-stripper movie "Magic Mike" - which features Hollywood beefcakes Channing Tatum, Joe Manganiello and Matthew McConaughey in various stages of undress - as mere eye candy. But many reviewers are finding the film, which is informed by Tatum's own experiences as an exotic dancer, to be a sly entertainment with some impressive performances, onstage and off. But The Times' Kenneth Turan is not one of them.

By the middle of the century, the number of days with temperatures above 95 degrees each year will triple in downtown Los Angeles, quadruple in portions of the San Fernando Valley and even jump five-fold in a portion of the High Desert in L.A. County, according to a new UCLA climate change study. The study, released Thursday, is the first to model the Southland's complex geography of meandering coastlines, mountain ranges and dense urban centers in high enough resolution to predict temperatures down to the level of micro climate zones, each measuring 2 1/4 square miles.

A recent art exhibition in Tunisia that some claim was insulting to Muslims has provoked new riots in the streets of the capital city of Tunis this week. The provocative exhibition was the annual Le Printemps des Arts, the Northern African country's largest visual arts show, which took place in the Tunis suburb of La Marsa. The exhibition featured a work that spelled out the word "Allah" with a string of ants, as well as other pieces that depicted the city of Mecca, according to reports from the BBC News and Reuters.

Snigdha Nandipati had a personal photographer following her for much of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. When the TV camera wasn't looking, there was 10-year-old Sujan, snapping picture after picture of his big sister the national spelling champion while she met with ESPN commentators and received interview preparation. "He took the camera from me and he doesn't want to give it back," father Krishnarao said last week. "He really wanted his sister to win. " And when 14-year-old Snigdha did win on Thursday night, a national TV audience was treated to Sujan racing onto the stage and clasping his arms around his sister's waist.

A 14-year-old girl from San Diego has won the 85th Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling "guetapens," a French-derived word that means an ambush, snare or trap. Snigdha Nandipati, an eighth-grader at Francis Parker School in La Jolla, was calm and collected throughout as she beat out eight other finalists Thursday at the competition in Oxon Hill, Md. Her grandfather had reportedly promised her a trip to India if she won. She is an avid reader and coin collector who aspires to become a psychiatrist or neurosurgeon.

Moviegoers may be impressed by "Snow White and the Huntsman's" computer-generated trolls, flying fairies and mythical beasts. But it could be Colleen Atwood's complicated, handmade costumes that really steal the show. The film's Queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron) may be losing her grip on the title of fairest of them all, but she nevertheless tops the cast's best-dressed list. In some cases, some of Ravenna's 20 outfits (counting several multiple versions of the same gowns) took weeks to construct, though they might appear on screen for only a few seconds.

Everyone knows Apple is popular in China -- so popular that people riot outside Apple's stores, or set up fake stores, or just crank out fake iPhones. On a recent trip to an electronics bazaar in Shanghai, we spotted a few of the most blatant of these knockoffs. Amusingly, the phones on display didn't look anything like actual iPhones -- instead, the manufacturers concentrated their piracy efforts on attempting to replicate the spelling of the names of popular devices and brands.

Actors Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott have listed their house in Malibu for sale at $2.675 million. The recently renovated 2,300-square-foot house sits on 1.73 acres covered in native plants and fruit trees. The single-story home, built in the 1960s, features 100-year-old French oak floors, three bedrooms and 21/2 bathrooms. Custom-built sliding doors lead outside to multiple decks and sitting areas. There is a chicken coop and a small horse corral. Spelling, 38, played Donna Martin in "Beverly Hills, 90210" (1990-2000)

"Magic City," an attractive, but frustrating new series from Starz about a Miami Beach luxury hotel, is the third drama this TV year, after the quickly dead "The Playboy Club" and the probably not returning "Pan Am," to be set in the middle of the 20th century. While on the face of it these shows seem like an attempt to draft off the cultural energy of "Mad Men," and may well be, they also represent in their small, halting way the birth of a new American genre, to join the western and the gangster film - midcentury stories of big dreams and dreamers, of prosperity and its undercurrents, set at the corner of Eisenhower and Kennedy, furnished with Eames chairs and cigarette machines.